“Since all of us are thinking all of the time as we try to navigate our social world, any set of social discourses that remains stable must have at least the appearance of coherence and acceptability, probably even to many of those who are most disadvantaged through them. And if intellectual frameworks are to appear coherent and defensible, it seems likely that they must actually be coherent and defensible across a substantial range of intellectual space.”

“For Waldron, the basic importance of guaranteeing people a chance to control property, and ideally a roughly equal chance, combines with the linkages between individuals and specific possessions to provide a strong argument against returning stolen lands to current indigenous claimants.”

“Once we begin this kind of analysis, we are likely to recognize many instances of real moral uncertainty, where any outcome may entail giving up something of value. … This is not something that socially abstracted kinds of political theory naturally leads us to admit, of course – with few facts to anchor them, more abstract approaches will often conjure up imagined social changes that dissolve the tensions and competitions completely. But political life is inherently complicated and ambiguous, and moral theorizing will probably be more valuable when it faces this squarely. Improving the moral character of our social lives is usually difficult and can be morally dangerous work – presumably our normative assessments should reflect this.”

“Until we understand the conditions faced by particular social locations, it is impossible to recognize how we respond as moral actors using the limited tools available to us. These responses are likely to be piecemeal, contextual, and strategy-sensitive – responses that reflect our limited capacities to produce outcomes in tension with overarching structures of power and discourse. But we have no way to avoid this in any case – despite occasional dreams, normative theorists are not masters of the world and will never be made so.” (14)

“If we focus on detail-rich examinations of particular political circumstances, there is much more limited room for such slippages to be activated – we will often know what we are talking about with some specificity, and will often be called upon to think carefully through the balancing of different kinds of human goods, rather than to deal in grand principles that ultimately commit us to far less determinate political conclusions than we wish to imagine.” (14)

“Ultimately, the goal of normative theorizing is to help ourselves and those who read our work to better navigate the social world. If we are unavoidably caught within webs of power-laden discourse, we will often become complicit in injustice despite ourselves … If we train ourselves and help others to look specifically at existing structures of power before making moral judgments, however, both we and they will have better chances to learn to navigate these structures effectively. … as normative theorists, our goal should be to contribute to a better world rather than to pursue mere intellectual curiosity.”

“We live in social systems constituted throughout by relations of power, and these relations shape our thought at very deep levels. Hoping to escape these limits by fleeing further into our intellectual frameworks themselves seem to me precisely the wrong solution.”